Dispatches from the road: Vancouver

I haven’t been to Vancouver in 15 years. It’s a great town. Walking around Vancouver you do get a sense of how diverse a place Canada is. 15-20 years ago, one of out every 3-4 people I met out here claimed some linkage to Atl. Canada – either they were from the region or their parents or some other family connection. While I haven’t had much time to talk to folks out here – my sense is that I would be hard pressed to find many people now that have such ties to back east. One day soon, if not today, it will be these folks in Parliament deciding the fate of the Maritimes.

Hey, I see that British Columbia is branding itself as the Best Place on Earth. I’m not much for marketing but it seems that if you set the bar too high, you set yourself up to fail. It’s like our Premier who wants “the best education system in Canada – from worst to first”. I’ll take a little bit better than last place as it would be a move in in the right direction.

I can’t help thinking about Humphrey Bogart’s line in Casablanca “…it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Substitute New Brunswick for “three little people” and I get that sense when I visit a place like Vancouver. There are whole suburbs out here where the average price of a house would be higher than the biggest houses in Moncton.

And yet, it is Leslie Neilson’s parody of that famous quote that really matters: “It’s a topsy-turvy world, and maybe the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans. But this is our hill. And these are our beans.”

The truth is that New Brunswick matters. In some small way, it matters.

2 Responses to Dispatches from the road: Vancouver

Interesting observations. I’ve recently moved to Vancouver and am about to move away again back east. You muse that it may or might be the case that the people here one day might have the greatest voice on NB’s economic development. Maybe. But oddly enough, the economy here can but occasionally glance over the Cordillera; if the ROC were to drop of the face of the earth, I doubt anyone in Vancouver would notice. I’m not an economist nor a political scientist. But would it be a stretch to say that NB’s economic development can suffer only from neglect?